Grantee: Sophia Lan HouTitle: MFA, Transdisciplinary Design

“How can personal style be a window to understand deeper issues of identity?” The BORN FREE project is a series of participatory, photo-based opportunities utilizing street style as an entry point to explore and engage a critical conversation around concepts of self-expression, courage, freedom, culture and legacy. The project has three parts: a mobile photobooth installation capturing style portraits with a participatory backdrop, an instructional workshop, and a final exhibition. The organizers want to provide people the opportunity to reflect on their own sense of style, relationship with self and others and interrogate why they make the choices they do when presenting themselves in the world. The project began as an initiative of Oak Street Style, a creative media agency, and has been implemented in Oakland, CA and Johannesburg, South Africa. The organizers are partnering with Oak Street Style to bring the project to the New School in an expanded capacity and, in addition to the photo series, have a one-day workshop and extended exhibition showcasing the street style portraits from all three locations: New York, Oakland, and Johannesburg.

What is your idea for the InSights project?

The BORN FREE project is a series of participatory photo-based opportunities utilizing street style as an entry point to explore and engage a critical conversation around concepts of self-expression, courage, freedom, culture and legacy. The project has three parts: a mobile photobooth installation capturing style portraits with a participatory backdrop, a workshop to more deeply reflect and interrogate the photos and a final exhibition. The project is an initiative of Oak Street Style, a creative media agency and has been implemented in Oakland, Ca and will travel to Johanesburg, South Africa this Fall. We would like to partner with Oak Street Style and bring the project to the New School in an expanded capacity and, in addition to the photo series have a one-day workshop and extended exhibition showcasing the street style portraits from all three locations: New York, Oakland, and Johannesburg.

What is the story that you will convey through the project? How do you hope people will think or act differently as a result of your project?

We hope the project will convincingly show that personal style is a window to understand deeper issues of identity, culture, freedom, courage, legacy and future visions. We want to provide people the opportunity to reflect on their own sense of style, relationship with self and others and interrogate why they make the choices they do when presenting themselves in the world. We hope to elucidate the choices we do or don't have and explore what enables us to have the courage to live authentically - despite how we might be perceived. We'd like to explore how our collective expression is or isn't responding to our current socio-political-environmental context.

Most importantly, we hope the project will serve as a source of inspiration and help each individual realize they play a meaningful role in shaping our collective times, simply by choosing how to visually express themselves.

How are you going to create an event that brings together people from different disciplines and backgrounds?

By strategically placing the mobile photo booth in high traffic areas near various university departments we will capture images of people from different disciplines. We hope by being photographed (in the project) they will be a natural mechanism of diverse outreach for the workshop and exhibition. We also plan specifically to outreach to different disciplines, framing the project in a relevant way to that field of study. The workshop itself will be an open platform that enables participants learn more in critical and creative ways. Also, as students in the Transdisciplinary Design program, we have had the opportunity to build many relationships across departments and disciplines, and amongst students and faculty. We will specifically outreach via these personal relationships, as well as flyers and social media. We also hope to encourage relevant courses to provide extra-credit for attending the workshop.

What expertise and experience equips you to lead this project?

I have extensive experience in managing projects with diverse stakeholders, creating cross-disciplinary photo-based curriculum and event planning. I have worked professionally as an editorial and special events photographer so I am familiar with the technical needs of the project. More specifically I am invested in utilizing photography as a tool for co-creation and empowerment. I conceived, designed and managed a project called Imaging Peace: Peace Building Literacy through Photography. The project was implemented in Providence Rhode Island with "at risk" youth and in Thailand at center for Burmese refugee youth.

In my current masters program our work is completely collaborative and project- based. I have had the opportunity to refine my skills - personal and technical - and I feel completely confident in my capacity to lead a collaborative project that is meaningful and meets the needs for all participants.

What are your ideas for keeping the dialogue and community going?

We plan to maintain transparency and open dialogue outside the physical photo shoots and exhibition through social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr) established in the name of the project. We will regularly update our activities, reflections and findings. For those interested in continuing the conversation between themselves, with us, or our external partner Oak Street Style the media sites will provide a sustained platform. Also we intend to use the workshop and exhibit as an opportunity to engage students across disciplines in a meaningful way, encouraging connection, dialogue and collaborative participation between them. Relationships are more likely to be sustained when people have a meaningful shared experience. Furthermore, two members of the team plan to carry this project into design work for other courses: Creativity, Innovation and Design, and Curation for Social Engagement. Finally all students hope to utilize the workshop as an experimental prototype for various thesis investigations.

View the project

Instagram: @bornfreenyc

Twitter: @BORNFREE_NYC

Grantees:

Sophie Lan Hou

Sophie Lan Hou is an artist, educator, and peace builder utilizing transdisciplinary design methods to innovate strategic collaborations for sustained impact. Currently in her final year of the MFA Transdiscplinary Design program at Parsons the New School for Design, Sophie is well-versed in collaboration, critical reframing, open innovation models and participatory design-led research. She comes from a diverse background of global studies, youth development, photography and the performing arts. Throughout her work and travels across six continents Sophie constantly seeks to discover, celebrate and empower our shared experience as human beings, encouraging an ever-deepening commitment to global citizenship, ecological sustainability, justice and equality.

Taylor Kuhn

Taylor is studying transdisiplinary design at Parsons the New School, a masters program that explores how collaboration across all disciplines can work to tackle the complex problems of today. Her educational background is in communication and packaging design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, with a number of years experience working in branding and product innovation design industries. A few of her current projects include local and global food justice, using art and rethinking physical spaces as ways to promote empowerment with one’s food and overall health, developing public awareness campaigns promoting the understanding of neuroscience and most recently, developing an Office for Public Imagination. She is now directing her focus on cultural evolution, it’s influences, and how we can collaborate to build our futures with social and environmental sustainability at its core.

June Cho West

June Cho West is a musician and artist beginning her education as a Transdisciplinary Designer at Parsons School of Design. She studied Sociology and French at the University of Montana for her undergraduate degree, emphasizing in sociological perspective and critical theory. Her experience has traversed many areas of interest, including creative writing, fine art, sustainable agriculture, environmental justice, and global studies. She has also been largely influenced by her travels throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Her skills in creativity, formulation, qualitative understanding and critical thinking will help the team pursue its interests in empowerment through self-expression and fashion. As she develops her mission as a designer, she commits herself to social justice, sustainability and reverting to “slowness” in a fast-pace, high-tech society.

Partners & Collaborators

OAK Street Style is a creative media agency based out of Oakland, California. As the brainchild of CHUN-MUI MILLER, her work grew out of a desire to (re)define style as it stands independent of “fashion.” In an effort to answer the questions of what is personal style, where does it come from and how & where does the real creativity happen, a series of larger conversations arose that attracted other artists to join the OSS team. These artists began their exploration of style as it relates to politics, art and culture by creating an ongoing series of streetstyle photographs & events that engage the audience to reflect on the deeper definition of style and its context within larger society.

TheDress Practice Collective is a New School student-run organization aimed at joining elements of visual culture, fashion theory, design studies and personal practice through a variety of media. We hope to spark conversations and initiate collaborations between students, faculty and members of the greater community. The organization was founded in Spring 2013 for the purpose of presenting exhibitions, organizing workshops, hosting film screenings and publishing original content.

PROJECT AFRICA (Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA)/Milano)

Project Africa is a collaboration formed by students in the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) to promote a deeper understanding of contemporary Africa. Through cross disciplinary dialogue, research, and special events Project Africa aims to expand narrow views of the continent and educate students and the public about Africa’s flourishing cultures, people, and beauty of the land. Every year this student-run organization brings together, some of the best minds researching and working in Africa, to share their findings and provide news from the field on topics ranging from fashion, history, politics and emerging issues.